As readers of a U.S.-based tech news site, members of this TMC unified communications community may tend to think of the UC market mostly through the eyes of a national. Regardless of the individual gaze, however, UC has spread to all countries, not least of which shines the market in Australia.

ShoreTel, an international provider of cloud-based UC services, knows the Australian market better than most. It recently introduced its new ShoreTel Hosted Voice (SHV) service that brings voice and video, call recording, conferencing, and many other business communications features to that audience. The company’s latest announcement addresses the fact that SHV has only been on the market for about two months, but has reached farther than could have been anticipated before this day.

Frederic Gillant, the vice president of Asia Pacific operations at ShoreTel, has more on SHV’s reach:

“We have received intense interest in ShoreTel Hosted Voice from our Australian partners since we launched the new service just over two months ago,” Gillant said. “Our partners are experiencing increased customer demand for cloud-based unified communications – or ‘UCaaS’ – solutions. Several partners have now closed their first SHV deals, these contracts were all signed and delivered within 2 weeks of quoting.”

It is clear from Gillant's statement that his company’s partners are delivering on their promise to quickly install the new hosted voice service at businesses’ locations. ShoreTel offers this new service directly through its partners and through its partners’ sub-agents. It has gathered data about the number of deployments those firms have made and knows now that more than 60 channel partners have expressed interest in offering the LHV.

In order to become approved to sell the new product, partners complete a one-day training course that shows them the ins and outs of what they can offer their clientele. The course may prove as both a refresher for global ShoreTel selling and marketing policies while also offering a wealth of new information about how SHV will operate within each end user’s premise.

Gillant continued his statement by noting that “it’s fantastic to see the level of responsiveness from our partner community.” He and others at ShoreTel should be nothing but excited to see how partners are gathering en masse to get their hands on what their customers want most. This is more than just a demonstration of how partners can fulfill the needs of their parent company; it shows how partners can both fulfill those needs and work for the best interests of their customers.

Demand for cloud-based communications comes from the lowest common denominator, the end user. Therefore, this surge from partners for the SHV shows that partners know what their customers want and are ready to provide them with everything they demand. This initial burst from the established partners will fade, but the connection between partners and the business community will remain, and that is what’s most important.